Best Email Marketing Software: Which One is Right for Your Business?

There are hundreds of quality email marketing software on the market today. The key to choosing which is best for your business is to understand what you are looking to get out of the software. Since every business has different needs, there is no one size fits all email marketing software, but you can break them all down into 4 primary categories:

Small business:This is the right category for most brick and mortar businesses that want an easy to use email marketing software that will be able to send out nice looking email blasts, capture leads from subscription forms, and has basic functionality to send out automated emails. Our winner – MailChimp.

Online marketers: This category is right for you if you have the time and expertise to take full advantage of complex marketing automation features. You fit into this category if you want to automate the content that is sent to a subscriber based on how they interact with your website and your previous emails. Our winner – ActiveCampaign.

Ecommerce businesses: If you are looking for email software that can easily track your current and potential customers and send them targeted product suggestions based on their purchase and browsing history, this is the category for you. Our winner – Klaviyo.

All-in-one marketing solutions: This is the right category for you if you have a medium to large business and want to combine sales and marketing efforts (e.g. your CRM, social media, and email marketing) under one umbrella in order to generate leads and increase revenue. You have a marketing team with the time and resources to set up the software, and the budget to invest in a pricey software. Our winner – Marketo.

We chose our favorite from each category based on hours of research and testing. In this article we will compare each top pick with two competitors within their category in order for you to see the full range of options.

Best Email Marketing Software for Small Businesses

This is the category for most small businesses who want an easy to use email marketing software that will be able to send out nice looking email blasts, capture leads from subscription forms, and has basic functionality to send out automated emails.

Software in this category will not be able to trigger emails based on subscriber events (such as opening an email), link activity on your website to unique subscribers, or create landing pages based on a subscriber’s purchase history. This type of advanced email marketing is overkill for most small businesses as it is more expensive and makes sending out emails fairly complicated.

We prioritized price, ease of use, templates, and customer support when choosing the best email marketing software for small businesses. MailChimp is the winner in all of these categories except for customer support, which is why we have named them the best for small businesses.

At no cost you have access to dozens of great looking, easily customizable templates that you can send out to up to 2,000 subscribers. You will be able to track which subscribers opened and clicked through on a particular email, and see an overview of whether your open rates are increasing or decreasing over a period of time.

With hundreds of integrations, it’s likely MailChimp will be able to work with your current systems (website, CRM, social media pages). Plus, once you feel like you’ve outgrown the free plan and want to try your hand at more advanced features, such as email automation, MailChimp has a pro plan that starts at just $10/month. This way MailChimp grows with your business.

The one downside to MailChimp is that there is no phone support, so if you have a question about the system you will have to send an email and wait for a response, or find the answer yourself in one of their self help articles.

While Constant Contact does not offer a free version, their $20 a month plan offers most of the same features as MailChimp. What they offer that MailChimp doesn’t is phone support, so if you want a lot of hand holding, Constant Contact may be a better option for you.

We included AWeber since it is a popular email marketing software in the small business space. However, compared to MailChimp and Constant contact, it’s less intuitive to use and the interface is not as clean. Plus, it does not offer any major functionality that MailChimp or Constant Contact doesn’t have. It does have more templates, but you’re likely to find a template you like with MailChimp or Constant Contact too.

Best Email Marketing Software for Online Marketers

This category is right for you if you have the time and expertise to take full advantage of complex marketing automation features. You fit into this category if you want to automate the content that is sent to a subscriber based on how they interact with your website and your previous emails.

For example, if someone displays interest (e.g. by reading articles) in a certain section of your website, you can then send them emails promoting products that are relevant to the section of the website they seem most interested in. This is all done automatically through the email marketing software. The reason why we don’t recommend this for most small business owners is because this software comes with an added level of cost and complexity.

The main focus for this category is marketing automation. That’s because online marketers need to push out their content strategically to make sure they are targeting the right people at the right time. ActiveCampaign is the winner in this category, as they have easy to understand visual workflows to create different journeys for subscribers depending on their actions.

For example, let’s say you want to re-engage subscribers who have not opened an email in 30 days, and if they still don’t engage, then you want to unsubscribe them from your list. This would look like the flowchart below. As you can see, it is very simple to understand the flow and easy to add different conditions.

We use ActiveCampaign at Fit Small Business and definitely recommend it to bloggers, software as a service (SAAS) companies, and any other online business with a lot of informative content.

Drip is the only option in this category that has a forever free plan (unlimited emails to 100 subscribers). Drip is an up and comer in this space and was built with marketing automation in mind. It is pretty neck and neck with ActiveCampaign, but in the end did not match up with the amount of features that ActiveCampaign has.

We included HubSpot in this category because it is an amazing tool for online marketers. It combines your content management system with email marketing and sales to create personas for all of your subscribers. Then you can target different content at different times through different devices depending on what you know about that person.

All of this functionality can be overwhelming for the average online marketer, and if you are not taking advantage of all of the capabilities, than it’s not worth the high price tag.

Best Email Marketing Software for Ecommerce Businesses

Ecommerce businesses are looking for an email software that can easily track their customers and send them targeted product suggestions based on their purchase and browsing history. The great thing about email marketing software that are created with ecommerce in mind is that they make it easy to set up things like abandoned cart emails or product suggestion emails.

Klaviyo is a good combination of having smart marketing automation solutions while still being easy enough for the average marketer to use without needing months to learn the system. This is why it is our winner for Ecommerce businesses.

Since Klaviyo is built with Ecommerce in mind, they make it easy to send out cart reminders, personalized newsletters and other best practice emails that are proven to work in Ecommerce. You are able to target customers based on their spending history, activity on your website and interactions with previous emails you have sent.

One downside is that since there is only email support, it can take a long time to get help from an expert, especially if there is a lot of back and forth. Though the customer support is knowledgeable, if you need immediate assistance, the wait time can be frustrating.

If you prefer more assistance when setting up your email marketing, Remarkety might be the best fit for you. They analyze the data from your account and send out a weekly newsletter with suggestions for how to improve your email campaigns.

Infusionsoft is a combination of an online store, customer relationship management (CRM) software, and email marketing. This makes it a very powerful all in one email marketing solution, where you will have a lot of data about each subscriber in one system.

With this ability comes a steep learning curve, which is why you will have to purchase a $999 package to help you get started. However, once you learn how to use Infusionsoft, it has a lot of capabilities for ecommerce businesses.

All-In-One Marketing Options for Advanced Marketers

This is the right category for you if you have a medium to large business that wants to combine sales and marketing efforts in order to generate leads and increase revenue. You will need a marketing team with the time and resources to set up the software, as it takes time and knowledge to set up all of your systems (website, CRM, social media, Google AdWords, etc.) so that they are interacting with each other within the software.

What makes these software so powerful is that since all of your sales and marketing efforts are in one place, you get a full picture of each of your customers and prospects. You can take what you know about them from various touch points, and automatically send them targeted emails based on their activity.

This may sound great, but it is very costly and time consuming to manage this process. If you don’t have an online store, multiple online marketing efforts, and a large sales and marketing team, then this is not the right category for you. However, we thought we would give you the top software in this category so you know what is out there.

Omnisend, formerly called Soundest, has mechanisms that enable users to conduct order follow-ups and customer reactivation.

Bottom Line

When choosing an email marketing software for your business, make sure you understand what you want to get out of the software first. What’s right for one company may not be the right fit for you, so find the one that fits your specific needs.

About the Author

Maggie Aland is a staff writer for Fit Small Business and editor of the Marketing and Reviews sections. She writes on a variety of marketing topics, ranging from newspaper ads to how to market your business on Facebook. Before joining Fit Small Business, Maggie worked as a marketing associate at a niche publishing company. There she was responsible for determining the marketing plan and keeping up with the budget of 10+ B2B products. Her experience includes email, direct mail, social media, events, and more. When not editing or writing, you can find Maggie looking for the best brunch spots in NYC.

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Comments (35)Disclaimer: Reviews on FitSmallBusiness.com are the product of independent research by our writers, researchers, and editorial team. User reviews and comments are contributions from independent users not affiliated with FitSmallBusiness.com's editorial team. Banks, issuers, credit card companies, and other product & service providers are not responsible for any content posted on FitSmallBusiness.com. As such, they do not endorse or guarantee any posted comments or reviews.Post Your Comment

I really appreciate this article because I am in the market for an email and automated system for my growing. Dsa business.
Klaviyo has really caught my eye. Can you please tell me if they would accept my corporate personal website for the shopping page please? Thank you!!

Choosing the best email marketing software for business is difficult when you don’t understand on what the software is. Make sure that you found the specific needs that your company needs as long as you know what it is. Having this article is a big help to everyone who suits or finds their business for what is the best. 🙂

Ivan, despite the fact that MailChimp is really user-friendly and overall great email service provider, I have to add my comment regarding pricing. MailChimp states that it is free to use, but if you want to use some of the useful features, you will have to upgrade to a $10 per month plan, to get access to full email automatization. Even though it is still really cheap I am working with very small subscribers database so paying 10$ every month still adds up. As a decent alternative I found Mailerlite (https://www.mailerlite.com/). All of its features are accessible for free and free plan will suit you until you have more than a 1000 subscribers. You should give it a try.

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